FROM MAULANA’S DESK

FROM MAULANA’S DESK 1. The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims 2018, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Jordan. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, born in 1925, in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, is an Islamic spiritual scholar who is well-versed in both classical Islamic learning and modern disciplines. The mission of his life has been the establishment of worldwide peace. He has received the Padma Bhushan, the Demiurgus Peace International Award and Sayyidina Imam Al Hassan Peace award for promoting peace in Muslim societies. He has been called ’Islam’s spiritual ambassador to the world’ and is recognized as one of its most influential Muslims1. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and are part of university curricula in six countries. He is the founder of the Centre for Peace and Spirituality based in New Delhi. THE PRICE OF BEING A TAKER I N the course of my visits to the US, I have met Indians of both Muslim and Hindu communities. I found that senior members of both communities have a common concern: they fear that the future generation is rapidly losing the identity of its traditional culture. Indeed, I have seen that although families of both the communities have achieved substantial material progress, they are unhappy. They strongly feel that their children will suffer a fate commonly known as cultural assimilation. I told senior members of both communities that their fear might be genuine but their present efforts were not going to yield positive results. The real problem is that both the communities are living in the US as takers and not as givers. Both strive to earn American dollars but they don’t try to figure as giver-members of American society. In the course of a conversation, one senior Indian remarked that the present development of America was due mostly to the labour of immigrants. I said, “No, although apparently immigrants seem to be working in